Ten Years

10 Years

Current mood:weird

This October (I think) is my ten year high school reunion. G-d that's fucking crazy. It certainly doesn't feel like it's been that long. I don't feel old enough to be having a high school reunion, although the abundant pounds I've gained and the grey hairs that won't take to dying would seem to say otherwise...
In honor of that event, I decided to pull out my old yearbooks while I was at my parents house last weekend. If I ever doubted why I hated high school so much, this stumble down memory lane was a clear reminder. I only went through two of them (the vomit was creeping up into my throat and I just couldn't stand the saccharine any longer) and I swear I counted at least fifty "Have a Great Summer!"s and "you're a great friend"s. Give me a fucking break. The more pages I turned, the more bitter I got, the more shallow the whole experience seemed. How depressing it is to realize how little people thought about what they wrote to each other in books that would be removed from dust-coated shelves years later by those in search of nostalgia. I can't say for sure, after all it has been ten years, but I don't remember writing falsies in my friends yearbooks back then. I really felt like I meant what I wrote and that for the most part I've done what I said I was going to do where my friends are concerned unless some unavoidable turn of events made doing those things impossible.
So now it's been ten years and I can count on one hand the number of people from high school I voluntarily keep in touch with. If it weren't for myspace, I probably wouldn't be in touch with any of them at all. I didn't have to even blink in deciding that I wasn't going to the reunion (held at a downtown Orlando bar on a Friday night during the middle of the school year--how convenient and appropriate) but if I ever had a shadow of a doubt about the decision, glimpsing the pages of lost friends and haunting nemeses made concrete the feeling in my heart that I was doing the right thing by staying in North Carolina where people, places, things and nicer weather keep me happy. After ten years, doing time at LBHS was undoubtedly the most painful, heartbreaking learning I have done in my life, and I'm not so eager to reminisce about the seemingly few and far between "good times" that taint the pages of Patriots' Pride.
The good news is that the memories weren't all bad: Christian and Rachel and a few others' autographs made me grin. Incidentally, Rach, wtf is with you signing my yearbook backwards every year? Did you do that to everyone?! Sheesh...There were some good times. I would just rather remember those over coffee at Denny's on 436 than in a bar with a bunch of people I'd rather forget.
So while my classmates are paying sixty bucks a head to remember the "good times" in Orlando (translation: gossip, gloat, and flaunt why they're better and more successful than each other), B and I will pop open a bottle of wine (and Mountain Dew), kick back in our hammock, enjoy the crisp North Carolina fall air, and be thankful we never have to go through the sadistic torture that was high school again.